Museum and Gallery Listings for Jan. 18-24

January 17, 2013

Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. A searchable guide to these and many other art shows is at nytimes.com/events.

Museums

Asia Society and Museum: ‘Bound Unbound: Lin Tianmiao’ (through Jan. 27) Lin Tianmiao is one of a rare kind in China, where she lives: a nationally and internationally renowned female artist. This museumwide show presents installations that have not been widely seen. Influenced by American artists like Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois and Ann Hamilton — who made the female body and traditional women’s occupations hot topics during the 1990s when Ms. Lin was living in New York — these productions are not particularly original. But they are striking for their surrealistic theatricality and labor intensive craft. 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, (212) 517-2742, asiasociety.org. (Ken Johnson)

Brooklyn Museum: ‘Go: a community-curated open studio project’ (through Feb. 24) Inspired by ArtPrize, an art competition in Grand Rapids, Mich., that awards money to artists based on votes by the public, and by local open-studios programs, the Brooklyn Museum created a contest in which the award was a spot in this exhibition. More than 1,800 artists registered with the museum; visitors went out to their studios and voted; and the Top 10 artists were whittled down to 5 by Brooklyn Museum curators. The results are less than stellar. “Go” has not unearthed any hidden masters of the borough, but it does raise questions about who should choose what appears in museums and what constitutes “great” art. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Martha Schwendener)

★ Brooklyn Museum: ‘Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art’ (through Feb. 17) This big, intellectually enthralling exhibition of Conceptual works from the 1960s and early ’70s is not a conventional museum period survey. Rather, it approximates how the rise of Conceptualism was seen while it was happening by one person: the curator, critic and writer Lucy R. Lippard, who was an extraordinarily energetic participant in and promoter of a trend that brought us the triumph of mind over matter in art. Anyone who wants art to be radically defiant of the market-driven system must see it. 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Frick Collection: ‘Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings From the Courtauld Gallery’ (through Jan. 27) This show of 58 drawings from a London museum and institute of art history covers a lot of ground — namely, the Renaissance, Baroque and Modern periods. The installation, which spills over from the lower-level galleries into the Cabinet Room off the lobby, encourages much back-and-forth between works of similar subject or virtuosity; Pontormo is paired with Michelangelo, Rubens with Rembrandt, and Goya with Daumier. 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Karen Rosenberg)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde’ (through April 14) Timed to the centennial of the Armory Show of 1913, this exhibition tells the story of African art’s debut in cutting-edge New York museums and galleries with exceptional candor. It makes clear that early-20th-century Americans received Modern art and African art as a single import, derived from French and Belgian colonies, distilled in Paris and presented on these shores by a few tastemaking dealers and collectors. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘George Bellows’ (through Feb. 18) Organized by the National Gallery in Washington, this exhibition starts strong with the lush early paintings of New York City and its residents for which Bellows is justifiably well known. It then devotes more than half its space to a disorganized reprise of his restless but steady artistic decline, which ended with his death in 1925 at 42 from a ruptured appendix. It does little to clarify his achievement, partly because of the short shrift given to his plein air oil studies and late landscape paintings. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Roberta Smith)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens’ (through Jan. 27) The first in-depth survey of the brilliant artistry and engineering of Abraham and David Roentgen, a father-and-son team of genius German cabinetmakers, features roll-top desks, writing tables, chairs and clocks. Rife with intricate inlay and marquetry, gilded mounts and hidden compartments revealed by the touch of a button, these objects were among the supreme status symbols of late-18th-century Europe. Video animations show seven of the desks in action. The show is, over all, a stealth blockbuster. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop’ (through Jan. 27) This absorbing, often amusing exhibition offers abundant evidence that photographers have been cheating since shortly after the medium’s invention almost two centuries ago. It features prints dating from 1846 to the early ’90s made from altered negatives; seemingly realistic images made by piecing together two or more negatives; hand-colored black-and-white prints; Surrealistic montages; and conceptual confections contesting the ideal of photographic truth. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Matisse: In Search of True Painting’ (through March 17) This stunning exhibition skims across the great French modernist’s long, productive career with a mere 49 stellar, often pivotal paintings arranged in pairs or groups according to subject. Examining his penchant for working in series and copying his own canvases, they shed new light on the arduous evolution of Matisse’s seemingly effortless art, forming one of the most thrillingly instructive exhibitions about the artist, or painting in general, that you may ever see. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ MoMA PS1: ‘Huma Bhabha: Unnatural Histories’ (through April 1) In this midcareer survey, long-enduring forms from the ancient world lend some gravity to the throwaway materials that are now commonplace in contemporary sculpture. You could also say that the precariousness of recent assemblage and installation art haunts Ms. Bhabha’s monstrous, totemic figures, which are typically made of Styrofoam, clay, rubber, wood scraps and wire mesh; either way, the juxtaposition is arresting. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084, momaps1.org. (Rosenberg)

MoMA PS1: ‘Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980’ (through March 11) This exhibition of works by black artists who lived and worked in Los Angeles during a time of revolutionary changes happening in art and society had its debut at the Hammer Museum last year as part of the citywide extravaganza “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.” Focusing mainly on assemblage, the show includes pieces by Melvin Edwards, Betye Saar, David Hammons and nearly 30 others. It contributes a valuable chapter to the American art history of the last 50 years. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084, ps1.org. (Johnson)

Morgan Library & Museum: ‘Fantasy and Invention: Rosso Fiorentino and Sixteenth-Century Florentine Drawing’ (through Feb. 3) With just under 30 works, including an unfinished Rosso painting on loan from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, a Rosso drawing from the Metropolitan Museum and a smattering of drawings and letters by other Italian masters in the Morgan’s collection, this small exhibition is a fine little introduction to the eccentricities of Florentine Mannerism and to one of the style’s quirkiest practitioners, who was lauded by Vasari as “bold and well grounded in draftsmanship, graceful in manner, sublime in the highest flights of the imagination.” 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org. (Rosenberg)

★ Museum of Arts and Design: ‘Doris Duke’s Shangri-La: Architecture, Landscape and Islamic Art’ (through Feb. 17) The Honolulu estate known as Shangri La is a masterpiece of refined eclecticism. Doris Duke, the owner, referred to it as a “Spanish-Moorish-Persian-Indian complex.” Whatever you call it, it looks magnificent in this show and the accompanying book. Both combine sparkling new color shots of the home and gardens taken by Tim Street-Porter; architectural documents and vintage photographs; pieces of the collection; and projects by contemporary artists who had residencies at Shangri La (which has served, since Duke’s death in 1993, as the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art). 2 Columbus Circle, (212) 299-7777, madmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly’ (through April 8) The 10th artist invited to select an exhibition from the Modern’s collection does the series proud. Installed in three far-flung galleries within the museum’s vaunted painting and sculpture collection, her effort disturbs the march of masterworks by concentrating on photographs, drawings and other works on paper as well as several kinds of design. At every turn it asks what is art, who is an artist and what makes for greatness? (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Born Out of Necessity’ (through Jan. 28) The title may or may not have an extra preposition, but the show itself is a fascinating array of recent acquisitions that have a fairly direct bearing on quality of life or actual survival. They range from classic (the 1908 Dixie cup) to cutting edge; cover both analog and digital; and include the tiny (the latest in earplugs) and the quite large (the 1952 United States Army Jeep). Whether born “of” or “out of” necessity, the displays attest to human ingenuity responding to human need. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925’ (through April 15) The pursuit of the holy grail of early modernism at its most feverish is presented as a multiple-medium, multinational effort in this dizzying, magisterial cornucopia. The 350-plus works by 84 artists encompass painting, sculpture, music, poetry, dance, film and photography; alternate between the tentative and the prescient; and capture something of both the terrors and thrills of the project, with clusters of paintings by Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian among the high points. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Edvard Munch: The Scream’ (through April 29) A version of Edvard Munch’s “Scream” is on view at this museum for the next six months, having come almost straight from the auction block. Protected by a Plexiglas box, like the Mona Lisa, it has been given a prominent perch opposite van Gogh’s “Starry Night” in the fifth-floor painting and sculpture galleries. There is talk of timed tickets. But if you can put up with all the pageantry, you’ll have a rare chance to get acquainted with “The Scream” in person and in context. The museum has built a mini-exhibition around the work, surrounding it with Munch paintings and prints that amplify its motifs and mood. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘New Photography 2012’ (through Feb. 4) In her pellucid photographs, Anne Collier contemplates old record album covers and an Edward Weston photograph in an old MoMA date book. In montages by Michele Abeles we see the bodies of naked men through spaces between grids and stripes cut from other printed materials. Shirana Shahbazi’s abstractions picture alluring colors and light of photography itself. Zoe Crosher recycles amateur snapshots by a woman who worked as an escort in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. The two members of a team known as Birdhead use nondigital cameras and black-and-white film to shoot scenes in their hometown, Shanghai. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘Projects 99: Meiro Koizumi’ (through May 6) It would be hard to find another work of contemporary art that protests war with such soulful grace as Meiro Koizumi’s “Defect in Vision” (2011), the main attraction of this small show. This 12-minute, black-and-white video dramatizes a final conversation between a kamikaze pilot and his wife, both of whom are blind, as they eat together in a small, old-world-style dining room. It is a riveting meditation on the doomed, myth-saturated mind of Japan’s warrior class in the last days of World War II. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972’ (through Jan. 28) This small but intense exhibition is the museum’s second show of an Eastern European female artist in less than a year, following the Conceptual performance and photography of “Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence.” For many Americans it will be their first look at Ms. Szapocznikow’s precocious Pop-Surrealist sculpture, much of which parallels work made on these shores by Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde’ (through Feb. 25) Modernist art, insurgent and utopian, ignited like a firecracker cluster in cities across the globe in the early 20th century, and Tokyo was one of them. Rising from the ashes after World War II, it produced huge amounts of new art, feisty, fantastic, often politically subversive. And a wave of it comes surging out at you like a blast of sound — half noise, half music — in this surprising exhibition made up of loans from Japan and little-seen material from MoMA’s collection. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Holland Cotter)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘Performing Histories (1)’ (through March 11) An awareness of the uprisings, protests, occupations and revolutions erupting around the globe is present in “Performing Histories (1),” a show of video, film and photographic work recently acquired by MoMA. Insurrection and resistance pervade the Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu’s film “Dialogue With Ceausescu” (1978), while the feminist personal as political is employed in Martha Rosler’s “She Sees in Herself a New Woman Every Day” (1976) and Sharon Hayes’s four-channel video “The Interpreter Project” (2001). Andrea Fraser’s two videos connect politics and the museum. In one she describes how scientific philanthropy in the 19th century directed wealth to museums and other public institutions rather than the poor, while another video delves into how MoMA itself interacted with revolutionaries and communists, like the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Schwendener)

★ New Museum: ‘Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos’ (closes on Sunday) This elegant, mind-expanding exhibition sidesteps the standard retrospective format and a linear, canonical version of art history. Ms. Trockel emphasizes her recent work in numerous mediums — most impressively ceramics, photography and drawing, sharing the spotlight with outsider artists, botanical illustrations and zoological models and even natural specimens. The result is completely entrancing, a celebration of nature and also of human nature — its curiosity, ingenuity and yearning for expression — encapsulated by the artist’s magnanimous vision. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side, (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Smith)

New-York Historical Society: ‘John Rogers: American Stories’ (through Feb. 18) The sculptor John Rogers (1829-1904) was the Norman Rockwell of his time. For a few decades following the Civil War, his lively, anecdotal, figurative tableaus known as Rogers Groups sold by the tens of thousands to middle- and upper-middle-class folks for about $15 apiece. Including examples of the technically impressive bronze masters from which the multiples were cast in plaster, this exhibition showcases an artist who was as remarkable for his entrepreneurial savvy as for his idealistic vision of life in America. 170 Central Park West, at 77th Street, (212) 873-3400, nyhistory.org. (Johnson)

★ Rubin Museum of Art: ‘Radical Terrain’ (through April 29) The third and last of three beautifully produced, back-to-back mini-surveys in the series Modernist Art From India, this exhibition combines landscape painting done in India in the years following independence in 1947 with recent work by young artists — some South Asian, most not — that corresponds to or comments on the older art. Small in size and unfamiliar in content, the show is large with history. 150 West 17th Street, Chelsea, (212) 620-5000, rmanyc.org. (Cotter)

★ South Street Seaport Museum: ‘Compass: Folk Art in Four Directions’ (through Feb. 3) The American Folk Art Museum presents some 200 works from its unparalleled collection in this beautifully orchestrated exhibition. Paintings, sculpture, textiles, scrimshaw, painted furniture and much, much more are arrayed along themes that reflect the history of Lower Manhattan — seafaring, commerce, social life and that all-important factor, the weather — but not too tightly. Poetic license is taken, yielding an intricate constellation of connected artworks, histories and concerns that highlights one of the city’s great treasures. 12 Fulton Street, Lower Manhattan, (212) 748-8600, southstreetseaportmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ Studio Museum in Harlem: ‘Fore’ (through March 10) In 2001 the Studio Museum in Harlem opened a dynamite group exhibition called “Freestyle,” which turned out to be the first in a series of shows introducing emerging artists of African-American descent. In the latest edition, “Fore,” organized by three young staff curators, Lauren Haynes, Naima J. Keith and Thomas J. Lax, covers the waterfront in terms of media, which it samples and mixes with turntablist flair, and in its contents, ranging from abstract to personal to political, sometimes combining all three. Firelei Báez, Sadie Barnette, Crystal Z. Campbell, Zachary Fabri, Yashua Klos, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Valerie Piraino and Nikki Pressley are some of the names to look for. 144 West 125th Street, (212) 864-4500, studiomuseum.org. (Cotter)

Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Richard Artschwager!’ (through Feb. 3) Mr. Artschwager had his first career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1988, and now, at 88, he is having his second. Much of the work — the furniturelike sculptures covered with wood-grain Formica and the paintings that appeared to be done with smudged soot — is familiar. His recent portraits of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, and his high-color landscapes of the American Southwest are not. An installation of his famous “blps” (pronounced blips), abstract lozenge forms, usually black and shaped like the uprights in an exclamation point, is in place on and around the High Line near the site of the Whitney’s future home at Gansevoort and Washington Streets. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)

Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2’ (through Jan. 27) “Plymouth Rock 2,” a single-room installation by a young up-and-comer consists of seemingly random video scenes projected on one wall and banal, shadow-casting objects on the floor. Images of heaving ocean swells shot from a swimmer’s point of view and of a beachcomber with a metal detector imply some kind of quest like a search for the Holy Grail, which turns out to be Plymouth Rock, the boulder whereon, legend has it, the Pilgrims first alighted in the New World, now a sadly nondescript tourist attraction. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Johnson)

★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Sinister Pop’ and ‘Dark and Deadpan: Pop in TV and the Movies’ (through March 31) The dark and truculent mood of this collection show is conversant with recent presentations of Warhol’s death-and-disaster paintings, but the curators make plenty of room for other artists (including photographers). The point is not to cast a pall over Pop as we know it; it’s to find common ground between the winking consumerism of early-1960s art and the antiwar, anti-corporate sentiment of work made later in the decade and into the 1970s. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Rosenberg)

Galleries: Uptown

★ ‘Calder: The Complete Bronzes’ (through Feb. 9) The ingenious master of spare, levitating modern sculpture in wire, wood and sheet metal turns out to have been almost as adept with the ancient dead-weight staple of bronze, as demonstrated by 35 examples and some dozen plaster models in this eye-opening show. They run the gamut from figurative to abstract; dabble in Surrealism; achieve their own kind of levitation; and delve into art history while enabling the artist to use his hands and amazing tactile sense in a different way. Mnuchin Gallery, 45 East 78th Street, (212) 861-0020, mnuchingallery.com. (Smith)

Galleries: Chelsea

‘Cellblock I’ and ‘Cellblock II’ (through Feb. 2) This pair of strenuously cerebral group shows, both organized by the scholar Robert Hobbs, envision the artwork as a kind of prison (formalist and otherwise). “Cellblock I,” in the main gallery, includes large paintings by Peter Halley, plans for underground mazes by Alice Aycock, works from Robert Motherwell’s “Open” series and Kelley Walker’s canvases printed with images of brick walls. The livelier “Cellblock II,” in the gallery’s new project space down the street, gathers smaller works by some of the same artists in “Cellblock I,” along with others like Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman and Nancy Holt. Andrea Rosen, 525 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 627-6000, andrearosengallery.com. (Rosenberg)

Galleries: Other

‘The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking’ (through Jan. 27) This heady, compact exhibition presents efforts from the 1960s and ’70s to visualize a species of mathematical formulas known as fractals, a term coined by the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot (1924-2012). The visual impact of the computer printouts, short films, 3-D models, letters, sketches and Polaroids on display is low, but the philosophical import is great considering the enormous advances in scientific imaging technology that have happened since those early days. Bard Graduate Center, 18 West 86th Street, Manhattan, (212) 501-3023, bgc.bard.edu. (Johnson)

★ Simon Dinnerstein: ‘The Fulbright Triptych’ (ongoing) This little-known masterpiece of 1970s realism was begun by the young Simon Dinnerstein during a Fulbright fellowship in Germany in 1971 and completed in his hometown, Brooklyn, three years later. Incorporating carefully rendered art postcards, children’s drawings and personal memorabilia; a formidable worktable laid out with printmaking tools and outdoor views; and the artist and his family, it synthesizes portrait, still life, interior and landscape and rummages through visual culture while sampling a dazzling range of textures and representational styles. It should be seen by anyone interested in the history of recent art and its oversights. German Consulate General, 871 United Nations Plaza, First Avenue, at 49th Street, (212) 610-9700, germany.info. (Smith)

Out of Town

★ Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: ‘Ai Weiwei: According to What?’ (through Feb. 24) As seen in its first American survey, the work of the lionhearted Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, is no match for his prominent role as a human rights advocate. The sculptures and installation pieces too often adhere to the fashionable international genre of handsome, Conceptually generated artworks. Explanatory labels do much of the heavy lifting, along with historically-charged materials and objects, like Chinese antique furniture and wood from destroyed Qing dynasty temples. The artist’s photographs and videos suggest that his documentary work may be best. On the National Mall, at Independence Avenue Southwest and Seventh Street, Washington, (202) 633-4674, hirshhorn.si.edu; free. (Smith)

★ Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art: ‘Oh, Canada’ (through April 8) Seesawing between bigness and intimacy, the personal and the communal, this 62-artist survey of contemporary art in the Great White North may tell you more about Canada’s identity crisis than it does about Canadian art. A sense of place, if not nationhood, does emerge in stark photographs of Newfoundland by Ned Pratt and Kim Morgan’s hanging latex cast of a lighthouse on Prince Edward Island. Elsewhere, cartoonlike pencil drawings by Annie Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona depict contemporary Inuit life and the artist Amalie Atkins stars in a prairie fairy tale involving musical wolves and bears with golden teeth. 87 Marshall Street, North Adams, (413) 662-2111, massmoca.org. (Rosenberg)

★ Yale University Art Gallery (continuing) In a museum era dominated by vying forces of bad economics and compulsive building, it’s a miracle when something comes out right, which makes the opening of the splendidly renovated and expanded Yale University Art Gallery a happy event. The angels of art, design and budgetary planning were on duty. Everything worked. The country’s oldest university art museum has arrived at a kind institutional ideal of opposites in balance: an encyclopedic teaching museum, big enough to get lost in, small enough for intimate art encounters. New galleries of Indo-Pacific art are a particular attraction, but so are other collections, including one of the countries premier holdings in American art and a small, matchless display of very early Italian Renaissance painting. A special exhibition, “Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America,” made up of Yale-owned material, is on view through July 14. 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, (203) 432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu. (Cotter)

Last Chance

El Anatsui: ‘Pot of Wisdom’ (closes on Saturday) Having made an international name for himself fashioning shimmering tapestries from the discarded foil and wire of liquor-bottle tops and wrappers, El Anatsui stages his third and best show yet at Jack Shainman Gallery. His latest efforts are rangier and more powerful on several fronts: composition, color, pictorial space and narrative suggestion. The sense of Mr. Anatsui opening up his art is unmistakable and thrilling. 513 West 20th Street, Chelsea, (212) 645-1701, jackshainman.com. (Smith)

★ Brooklyn Museum: ‘Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe’ (closes on Sunday) This invigorating exhibition is dominated by big, brash collagelike paintings, thick with color and studded with rhinestones that depict cacophonous landscapes, spatially skewed interiors and, best of all, images of imperious black women among swaths of brightly patterned fabrics. Building on Conceptual identity art, borrowing from art history and 1970s blaxploitation extravagance, they subvert prevailing notions of beauty and taste and subvert the male gaze while offering resounding proof that the political, not only the personal, can also be stunningly pictorial. Bravo. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Smith)

Agnes Denes: ‘Sculptures of the Mind: 1968 to Now’ (closes on Saturday) By the end of the 1960s, art’s final frontier was mind itself, and Agnes Denes has been one of its brainiest and far-ranging explorers. This much abridged retrospective includes a miniature tableau of skeletons in philosophical conversation, diagrams of a system of symbolic logic that Ms. Denes thought up, and photographs of outdoor works like the wheat field she planted on a parcel of landfill near the World Trade Center in 1982. Leslie Tonkonow, 535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 255-8450, tonkonow.com. (Johnson)

★ Frick Collection: ‘Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier)’ (closes on Sunday) “You’ll shortly make the acquaintance of Mr. Patience Escalier — a sort of man with a hoe, an old Camargue oxherd,” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, from the Provençal city of Arles in 1888. His bracingly vivid portrait the same year of this local character, with his grizzled beard and steely blue eyes offset by a ruddy complexion and bright yellow hat, normally resides at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. But for the past few months it has been at the Frick as part of an exchange program between the two museums. Installed on a temporary wall in the Oval Room, it shocks the neighboring Whistler portraits with its feral gaze and forthright celebration of hard labor. 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Rosenberg)

★ Guggenheim Museum: ‘Picasso Black and White’ (closes on Wednesday) Billed as the first monochromatic look at Picasso’s whole career, this exhibition is as eye-opening as it is elegant. That’s especially true among the later works on the upper ramps, which push well past the obligatory Neo-Classicism and Analytic Cubism into bracingly sensual explorations of the figure, strident political cries de coeur à la Guernica, and winking homages to Delacroix and Velázquez. Also notable: Thirty eight of the show’s 118 works have never been exhibited in this country, and 5, among them the sharply angular “Bust of a Woman With a Hat” (1939), have never been on view publicly. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Rosenberg)

Chris McCaw: ‘Marking Time’ (closes on Saturday) In Chris McCaw’s haunting yet matter-of-fact photographs, the sun has burned crispy-edged lines across the skies of spectral land- and seascapes. Mr. McCaw constructs his own large-format cameras, which he equips with military surveillance lenses. Traveling to remote places, he exposes sheets of photo paper for durations from 15 minutes to 24 hours. The lens concentrates the sun into an inflammatory dot, which cuts through the paper like a welder’s torch slicing through steel. Yossi Milo, 245 10th Avenue, near 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 414-0370, yossimilo.com. (Johnson)

New Museum: ‘Judith Bernstein: “HARD” ’ (closes on Sunday) Ms. Bernstein is well-known for the giant drawings of phallic screws that she began making in the late 1960s. Two from the ’70s are the main attractions in this much-abbreviated, 40-year retrospective, her first show in a museum. In these bravura performances of draftsmanship on vast sheets of paper, the screws extend horizontally as if they were drilling tunnels through mountains. Rendered by sweeping strokes of charcoal, they appear wildly hairy and scarily purposeful: biomechanical monstrosities of testosterone-fueled fury. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side, (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Johnson)

John A. Parks: ‘Paint and Memory’ (closes on Saturday) The strange, seemingly innocent paintings that dominate this show are small, based on the artist’s childhood memories and painted with his fingers. The loosely Pointillist, somewhat Vuillardian hazes of color, light and form that result demarcate trees, gardens, brick buildings, puffy clouds and, above all, scrambling children, whose feral energy and natural subversiveness are vividly conveyed. The distinction between illustration and painting is rendered moot by the teeming quality of both surface and subject. 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, 532 West 25th Street, Chelsea, (917) 701-3338, 532gallery.com. (Smith)

★ Philadelphia Museum of Art: ‘Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp’ (closes on Monday) This Philadelphia show, an ensemble performance composed of entirely stars, with an elusive sun, Marcel Duchamp, at the center, focuses on a transformative moment in American modernism when a heroic view of art ended, and another view, cool, wry and brainy, began. Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, philamuseum.org. (Cotter)

Sandra Sheehy: ‘Music From a Garden at Dusk’ (closes on Saturday) A magical mini-survey of the eight-year progress of a contemporary self-taught artist whose free-form way with paper, beads, shells, stones, sequins, pearls, thread and yarn, as well as embroidery and quite a bit of ingenious wrapping and knotting, yields eccentric, cocoonlike assemblages that hold culture and nature in exquisite balance. Cavin-Morris Gallery, 210 11th Avenue, at West 25th Street, Chelsea, (212) 226-3768, cavinmorris.com. (Smith)

★ The Walters Art Museum: ‘Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe’ (closes on Monday) This history-rattling exhibition is a visual gift, with marvelous things by artists familiar and revered — Durer, Rubens, Veronese — along with images most of us never knew existed. Together, they map a history of art, politics and race that few museums have addressed in full-dress style. Like the best scholarship, the Walters show, organized by Joaneath Spicer, the museum’s curator of Renaissance and Baroque art, is as much about questions as answers. It takes a prized piece of art history, one polished to a glow by generations of attention, and turns it in an unexpected direction, so it catches the searching, scouring rays of new investigative light. (This exhibition moves to the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, N.J., next month, running from Feb. 16 to June 9.) 600 North Charles Street, Baltimore, (410) 547-9000, thewalters.org. (Cotter)

Correction: January 23, 2013

A picture caption in the Listings pages on Friday about the exhibition “Calder: The Complete Bronzes” used an outdated name and Web address for the gallery where the exhibition is on display. While it was L&M Arts when the show opened, the name of the gallery, at 45 East 78th Street in Manhattan, is now Mnuchin Gallery, not L&M Arts. The Web site is now mnuchingallery.com, not lmgallery.com.